Unlock Your Beast [14 of 20] – The “I’m Too Lazy” Myth

Ok, so if you’ve been following this series you may have gotten to a point where you’re thinking, “Ok all this stuff sounds good, but I’m afraid I’m just too lazy to get any good out of this. I’m just never going to be that kind of Beast that accomplishes at a high level and gets a lot of stuff done and then just really crushes it and wins.” Or whatever you think that means.

And I get what you’re saying. I mean, I felt the same way. I spent so much time just lying on my couch wasting time that I just began to think, you know, “maybe I’m just too lazy to really accomplish anything big in life.”

And if that’s you, I would urge you to do this exercise. Figure out whatever the biggest time-waster is for you. What are you doing? What’s the biggest time-waster for you? And then just become curious and observe how you feel.

Don’t try to stop doing it. I mean, don’t try to avoid that activity. Go ahead. Do it. Like, if it’s lying on the couch, go ahead and lie on the couch. But really become curious about how it affects you and how you feel while you’re engaging in that activity. And afterwards, what’s the effect?

This is a technique that was introduced by Judson Brewer in a TED talk that he did. And he gave the example of a woman who wanted to stop smoking. Or she tried several different ways to stop smoking and nothing worked and he told her “Go ahead and smoke, but just become curious about how that experience is for you.” That’s all he told her to do—and [to] write it down.

So she came back and said she wrote down and realized “Wow! Cigarettes taste nasty! I don’t like the taste of them.”

So after doing that—after just becoming mindful of her experience while engaging in this habitual behavior, she was able to break that habit because she became aware of how it didn’t serve her.

So I would like to suggest to you that you’re not lazy—that you probably just have some habits that you’ve fallen into—some habit patterns—that tend to take up a lot of time and really waste time. And the very fact that you recognize—the very fact that you would call yourself lazy, to me indicates that you’re not lazy.

Because, if your highest desire was to lay on the couch, you wouldn’t be watching this video right now about how to break that habit. So I’d like to suggest to you that you’re not lazy—that you’re exactly where you need to be. And here’s something concrete that you can do to help yourself break those habits.

And I’d also like to say that habits, even though they’re gratifying—I mean, habits wouldn’t become habits if they didn’t suit some sort of a gratification—but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily align with who you really are—your highest and truest desires.

And I think once you become mindful of the feelings and emotions and the effect that engaging in these habits has on you, you’ll begin to recognize that these habits are separate from you. They are not you. You are not your habits. They are separate from you and they don’t really align with and reflect who you really are.

So in summary, begin to see yourself as separate from your habits—especially ones that may waste a lot of time and make you think that you’re lazy—and become curious about how you’re truly affected when you engage in these habits.